This article was published on August 11, 2014

The White House creates a Digital Service team to solve government tech problems


The White House creates a Digital Service team to solve government tech problems

Learning from its mistakes with the Healthcare.gov debacle, the Obama administration has launched the US Digital Service, a team of technologists that will advise government agencies on their IT projects, as noted by The Washington Post.

Former Google reliability engineer Mikey Dickerson, who played a critical role in fixing Healthcare.gov, will head up the new team.

The USDS, as it’s called, isn’t primarily focused on providing direct engineering support. That’s left for the General Services Administration’s 18F unit. Instead, Dickerson and his team will provide multi-disciplinary consulting work to help agencies think through how to get their user experiences on par with the private sector.

With today’s launch, the USDS has released a Digital Services Playbook, which outlines 13 best practices for government tech, and a TechFAR handbook for teaching officials how to contract agile software development from the private sector.

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Screen Shot 2014-08-11 at 11.51.03 AM

Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT [The White House blog]

Featured image credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

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